Thursday, November 19, 2015

Leaving Decay in His Wake

The opening of chapter fifteen really stuck with me. We often get some great character description, as strong as the scene with Hester first stepping forth to face public humiliation, or that scene with Dimmesdale shrieking in the middle of the night in the woods. Here, we get a dark illustration of Mr. Chillingworth. There have been paragraphs depicting his fiendish look, but I feel like this passage completes the picture.  (DISCLAIMER: I skipped around a bit and took the most poetic parts, so it's not a completely direct quotation).


So Roger Chillingworth--
a deformed old figure,
with a face that haunted men's memories longer than they liked--
went stooping away along the earth.
                     His gray beard almost touched the ground,
                                   As he crept onward.

The woman looked on with half-fantastic curiosity
To see whether the tender grass of early spring
Would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps,
Sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure.
                   Would the earth greet him with poisonous shrubs,
                                    Called to light by his evil purpose?

Or might it suffice him
That every wholesome growth
Should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch?
Did the sun,
              Which shone so brightly everywhere else,
                                 Really fall upon him?

And whither was he now going?
Would not suddenly sink into the earth,
Leaving a barren and blasted spot
Where the evils within him
              Would grow deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane,
                               And whatever else vegetable wickedness the climate could produce?

Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away,
Looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?



One final note: I just find it so entertaining that Chillingworth is described as a leech and a bat. A very vile man. Which raises the question in my mind "Why does Hawthorne pose Dimmesdale and Hester, the ones who have committed a terrible misdeed, as highly regarded characters while Chillingworth, a man who has done nothing against the law, is associated with malice and cruelty?



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